


When They Have to Take You In

by sadlikeknives



Series: Once Upon a Time in Iowa [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-20
Updated: 2009-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-22 23:53:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/919527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadlikeknives/pseuds/sadlikeknives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spock and Jim come back to where they began.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When They Have to Take You In

**Author's Note:**

> Title slightly bastardized from Robert Frost.

Spock has more blood kin left than any other Vulcan who yet breathes. The thought is cold comfort, but after he is released from Starfleet's interminable debriefings on the destruction of Vulcan and eighty percent of the graduating class and the near-destruction of Earth (it is already being referred to by the clean, sterile, "Narada incident") he goes to them in Riverside, Iowa. Someone has to, and this he may spare his father.

He has always known he does not belong here, but he has never felt it more than when he sits in his Starfleet uniform on his aunt's floral-print couch, in a room that has not changed in any meaningful way since he was eleven years old, and tells them how his mother died. They weep. Brad holds his mother. Spock is dry-eyed and blank-faced, and he does not think they understand it is not from lack of feeling. Vulcan is a desert planet; his tear ducts do not function as theirs do. And the last time he let himself show the depth of this he almost killed a man he had once counted friend, who was only trying to save this world.

Then comes a banging at the door and Brad goes to answer. Spock twists around in his seat in shock when he hears a hoarse voice say, "Hey, Brad. Is Spock around?"

How many times when he was eleven did he hear those exact same words? Without that sardonic, self-aware inflection, to be sure, but. For a moment he is almost dizzy with the force of nostalgia. He stands and goes to the door, and when he comes up behind Brad he realizes that he is taller than him now. "What are you doing here?" he asks Jim. He actually looks worse than he did a few days ago, all the bruises come to the surface. It is a wonder he can talk at all.

"I live here. Or I did. Well, not here, here. You know what I mean."

"What happened to your neck?" Brad blurts out. "Did a Romulan do that?"

"Nah." Jim doesn't take his eyes off Spock. "I finally managed to piss off my CO enough that he tried to strangle me. Everyone's been saying it was coming since I joined Starfleet. Spock. C'mon. Walk with me."

"I will return shortly," Spock tells Brad, and Jim shouts into the house,

"Rosemary! I'm stealing your nephew."

"You bring him back in one piece, Jim Kirk!" Jim is, apparently, not the only one all too aware of the irony inherent in the fact that life has brought them back around to this moment, this place.

They match stride down the front steps and out onto the sidewalk, and Jim says, "They came to box up my roommate's stuff and I decided I had to get out of there. My mom was pretty surprised, but," he shrugs, then winces like it hurts. It probably does. He's put his body through more in the last week than most people will manage in a lifetime. "Didn't have anywhere else to go. Plus I thought you might be here."

"I might have gone to Morocco," he points out. The emergency camp for the paltry few survivors of Vulcan is being set up there, since the Sahara is as much like Vulcan as anywhere they will find on this world; is, in fact, the most suitable environment on a world that has offered refuge. Every set of hands will be needed. The counselors, he thinks, will more than have their hands full: ten thousand shell-shocked, grief-stricken Vulcans who've just lost everything and everyone, and have been raised all their lives not to show it. It is going to be a disaster, and he can only hope that the logical argument of not reducing their number even more will be enough to keep the suicide rate down.

"Yeah, but you had to come here, first."

"Are we?"

"Are we what?"

"Friends."

"Hell if I know, but we were when we were kids, and I'm pretty sure you don't need an 'it's complicated,' right now, so I figure 'friends' will do." They walk half a block in silence before Jim says, "Uhura says I should say, 'I grieve with thee,' but I kind of figured you knew that."

"Yes," Spock agrees.

"Talk to me."

"I do not know what to say."

Another block passes. They'll run out of town, soon, and they are too old to go running among the rows of corn. Jim turns right and Spock goes with him.

"They're making me a captain and giving me the Enterprise. There's supposed to be a ceremony in a couple of weeks, once Pike's out of the hospital and all."

Spock stops dead. Jim takes one more step, then pivots on his heel and raises one eyebrow at him. "It seems illogical," Spock admits, "but I cannot see any other course of action they could have followed." Spock had looked up Jim's record before the academic disciplinary hearing. He'd started the Academy with a spotty academic record but stellar test scores, then breezed through four years of coursework in three. And he didn't believe in no-win scenarios. He had 'command material' written all over him. "After you commanded the flagship in battle, they could hardly assign you to serve under anyone else."

"Yeah? Because I'm thinking they're pretty insane. Anyway, I'll be keeping a lot of the crew. Don't have a first officer, yet, though. I figure another raw cadet won't swing it for that one."

Jim is asking him something that Spock cannot answer, not directly. "My people will need me."

"Yeah," Jim says, "I'm sure they will," so why is it that Spock hears 'we?' He tips his head back and looks at the blue sky of Earth. "For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother."

"What?"

"Shakespeare."

"I know the quote, Jim." He bites back a comment to the effect that he is surprised that Jim does. Jim has always specialized in surprising him.

"Good, I was going to worry about the quality of that Vulcan education of yours. Just. You've got brothers and sisters. Don't forget that, okay?"

He does not answer. Instead he says, "My education was impeccable. And my mother, and I quote, would have jumped off a bridge before raising a son who didn't know Shakespeare." The look on her face in the moment before she fell fills his mind again and closes his throat anew, accompanied as it is by the memory of an ongoing argument his parents had had about the relative merits of Vulcan versus human poetry. Amanda had insisted poetry written purely for aesthetics was "doing it wrong."

Jim switches gears again. "Do you believe in fate?"

"No. The notion of some outside force guiding our lives is illogical. Recent events prove that quite clearly. Because of one man's choice, Vulcan died. Romulus lives."

"Yeah, but--" Jim stops talking, closes his mouth quickly. After a moment he switches gears again. Spock is beginning to get mental whiplash. "Wanna blow something up for old times' sake? I bet my mom's still got something of my ex-stepdad's in the attic."

He stares at him. Blinks. "No, Jim, I don't want to blow anything up." He would be willing to be talked into it, but he doesn't think Jim has the energy for that at this point. Really, he should be lying down somewhere, but: he is Jim Kirk.

"You're no fun."

"I was not trying to be." Jim laughs, short and sharp. It sounds like it hurts on more than one level. "I would like to apologize."

"For what?"

"I have a list. Would you like to hear it?" It begins, 'I brought up your father,' and ends with, 'I'm abandoning you and the Enterprise now,' with stopovers at, 'I marooned you on an ice planet,' and, 'I tried to choke you to death' along the way. Whatever they were when they were eleven, he does not see how they can be friends now.

But then Jim gestures with the hand that's not in his pocket. "Water under the bridge. Hey. Check out where we are."

He looks around at vaguely familiar houses, cracked pavement, the street sign. The corner they are standing on is completely unremarkable. For a moment, he is confused, but then he remembers, and understands why Jim is smiling so bright.

It is the corner where they met, and they are alive and the sun is shining.


End file.
